This is my first post on the board, and most of the answers I've sought I've been fortunate enough to find in this forum. In my own way I wanted to make a contribution (albeit small). I've noticed that all of the posts on the forum, in regards to window managers, tend to center around Openbox and LXDE. These are great window managers, I've used them briefly myself. My default window manager is typically Joe's Window Manger which tends to be available on most distros, and it's a better performing, albeit less powerful Openbox look-alike. However, on the RasPi processing power and onboard RAM are significantly more limited, so I again delved into the world of window managers to see if there was something that would perform better than jwm. Furthermore, since the RasPi has only two USB ports, one of them is permanently dedicated to a keyboard, and the other tends to be some form of external storage. Therefore, I required a window manager which would work using mostly keyboard inputs as opposed to direct mouse control. The result I came up with is SithWM. However, I found there was no package for it in the ArchLinuxARM repositories, but it is available in the AUR.

Essentially it gives you a rundown of how to get Arch properly configured, along with how to set up SithWM and the rationalizations as to why SithWM as the window manager of choice for the RasPi. It's somewhat aloof and silly, but does delve superficially into the technical aspects. It's structured in an extremely step-by-step fashion. Assuming you have the latest Arch image and follow my steps to the letter you should encounter no problems. Feel free to post any inquiries or suggest changes if something is unclear.

I'm not sure I understand your question. SithWM isn't included by default, nor is it included on boot. It has to be downloaded from the Arch User Repositories, made into a package, and then installed via pacman.

I understood someone has to compile it, if that is what you are saying. Maybe I did not understand your how to, it sounded like it has to be built in before initial boot after compiling, like it cannot be installed later with Pacman.

I would hope if enough interest is expressed, it would become available in the Pi repository.

You are correct, it doesn't come pre-compiled in the core, extra, or community repositories. So you download the package build (from the Arch User Repositories) and compile it yourself. Then with the pacman -U command you install your custom compiled package. It's the same thing as a regular package the only difference is regular packages come pre-compiled. The boot process has nothing to do with this procedure however.

Okay, thanks, I will have to wait until someone else compiles it, I have not experience with compiling and won't be wanting to any time soon. I will have my hands full, just getting my Pi running well enough when it arrives, without also having to tie it up with compiling any packages.

Well if you follow my guide you should have no problem as the steps would be exactly the same (assuming you have a Model B and the newest Arch image), but I can go ahead and provide the pre-compiled package here. Though I don't know what the forum policies are regarding such attachments.

Added yet another small explanation on setting up a fake clock that updates itself so your system time is a bit more current than just resetting to the unix epoch each time. It is a more in-depth version of this thread.

grimpirate wrote:Well if you follow my guide you should have no problem as the steps would be exactly the same (assuming you have a Model B and the newest Arch image), but I can go ahead and provide the pre-compiled package here. Though I don't know what the forum policies are regarding such attachments.

I am still struggling to get reliable command line access, so getting a precompiled package would be wonderful. You can always try uploading the package here and if it breaks any rules, you would find out pretty fast. There also is pastebin where people can put files for free.

Updating this thread because the previously supplied steps did not work with the newest Arch image. The PKGBUILD for SithWM is out of date (I reported it in the forums on Arch Linux, but that's no guarantee of anything). I found this out because I suffered a power outage and the image on my SD card was wiped. Therefore, I had to reinstall everything from scratch. I was unable to install SithWM following the old procedure I had listed and so had to modify the PKGBUILD myself to get it to create a package successfully. As opposed to editing one line in the PKGBUILD, now a couple of lines need to be edited. Still fairly simple, and in still a very good lightweight window manager. The tutorial previously linked reflects the changes.